Burmese Civil War Turns Grimmer for a Guerrilla

Soldiers in the Kachin army and civilian militia trainees warming themselves during training in Kachin State.Credit
Adam Dean for The New York Times

DUMHPAWNG KAWNG, Myanmar — When the Burmese soldiers dumped the body of a young ethnic Kachin guerrilla fighter outside a jungle hut in front of his commander, he was still in his uniform. His right hand had been shredded with a knife. There was a large gunshot wound in his stomach.

The Burmese had captured and tortured the fighter, Lance Cpl. Chang Ying, the previous day in retaliation for the Kachin army’s detention of two Burmese officers who had entered Kachin territory, said the commander, Maj. Robin Maran. The Kachin released both officers alive. In exchange, they got the lance corporal’s body.

“The Burmese didn’t show mercy,” Major Maran said some months after that exchange. “I told them, ‘We showed our good nature to you, but you didn’t show good nature to us.’ ”

That round of violence last June contributed to the end in the same week of a 17-year cease-fire between the Burmese military and the Kachin Independence Army, which controls an autonomous region where rivers from China slice through the deep valleys of northern Myanmar. Burmese generals have pressed their offensive even though Myanmar’s president, Thein Sein, who is trying to blunt the repressive policies of this military dictatorship, ordered a halt on Dec. 10.

Mr. Thein Sein’s order was part of a broader liberalization campaign meant to end Myanmar’s long isolation and re-engage the country with the United States and its allies. While there are occasional setbacks, his government is courting political opponents it once imprisoned, rewriting draconian laws and seeking peace with some ethnic minorities. But those geopolitical changes all seem very distant in the secluded Kachin homeland, and Major Maran, 56, who has seen the ups and downs of a struggle against the Burmese that has lasted decades, is not one to put much store in proclamations of peace, as he wages a war that has unfolded largely out of sight of the rest of the world.

The unit he commands, the 15th Battalion of the Third Brigade, with more than 200 soldiers, has been at the heart of the new conflict. The enemy is different this time, better trained and armed, the major said. Lance Corporal Chang Ying was the first of four men he has lost in this conflict, he said.

Two months ago, the major, a short, soft-spoken man who wears a pistol on his right hip, organized the retreat of the battalion’s headquarters from a site that had been surrounded by Burmese soldiers. His superiors ordered him to set up a temporary base here, on a forested ridge above a dirt road. It consists of 10 bamboo huts, just as many roosters and a net where soldiers in T-shirts play kick volleyball.

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Maj. Robin Maran joined the Kachin army in 1975.Credit
Adam Dean for The New York Times

The 21 soldiers here could be asked to move again soon, so the major has not ordered them to dig trenches or foxholes. They spend their days on short patrols and watch duty.

One day at dusk, there was an explosion to the south. Two foreign visitors looked up. The major did not. “It’s a mortar round or a land mine,” he said. Minutes later, there were booms from a different direction. “Chinese construction,” the major said.

The major is from Myitkyina, the capital of the Burmese-controlled part of Kachin State. Like most Kachin, he is Christian. His father was the deacon of a Baptist church. Major Maran joined the Kachin Independence Army in 1975, more than 13 years after the Kachin and other ethnic militias went to war with the Burmese because of a military coup in Yangon.

“I admired the founders of the Kachin army,” he said. “I knew I needed to protect and fight for the rights of the Kachin.”

The major served first with the 11th Battalion in his hometown. In 1977, he was assigned to a unit in this mountainous area near the Taping River. “There used to be fighting every year in the dry season,” he said. “By the protection of God, I didn’t die.”

He added: “The fighting now has been the most difficult. Before, we could defeat and occupy Burmese posts because they didn’t know our strategy and didn’t understand guerrilla warfare. Now, they know.”

The major reminisced about Kachin victories in his younger days: in 1978, when the Kachin attacked a police station on the plain, and the next year, when Burmese soldiers surrendered en masse after their air support failed to show.

“Back then, our soldiers were very different,” he said. “They slept on beds made only of four thin bamboo poles. They had much fewer weapons. They had to sew their torn uniforms. Life was much harder.”

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The Kachin army controls an autonomous region.Credit
The New York Times

The Kachin have the advantage of terrain. They know the hills. But the Burmese officers have received better training in recent decades, sometimes in India, and they have upgraded to deadlier arms like heavy mortars, the major said. Two of his soldiers were killed by mortar fire recently.

“The mortar rounds shatter our huts to pieces,” he said. “They’re so loud, and the earth shakes. That’s why some of the young soldiers are scared.”

The major has a 26-year-old son who joined the Kachin army in 2004. “I want to hand over this duty of defending our nation, so I’m glad he has joined the army,” the major said. He rarely sees his five children, and he can go more than a year at a time without seeing his wife. During the cease-fire, he stayed with his men.

Major Maran and a handful of his soldiers fought against the Burmese on June 8, the day before the enemy seized Lance Corporal Chang Ying. It seemed to the major that the Burmese wanted to expand their control of the area around a hydropower project on the Taping River run by the China Datang Corporation.

The Kachin dug foxholes and reinforced bunkers atop a strategic hill called Bum Sen. The major commanded seven men against a Burmese force of at least 60 soldiers. The Burmese attacked around 7 a.m. with mortars and small arms, he said. The fighting lasted until 12:30 p.m., when officers at headquarters on both sides agreed to a cease-fire.